Plea For Better Responsive Web Design Support In Browsers

Posted on: February 04, 2012

Responsive Web Design http://bit.ly/f6TPB7 is an extremely important
approach/technique/movement for making web mobile-friendly. Given that
web mobile traffic is exploding and there were more smart-phones sold in
2011 than PCs http://vrge.co/wqOiED the importance of the movement
can not be emphasized enough.

We have some significant obstacles on the path of fully optimized
Responsive Web Design, however. Responsive Images (smaller images for
smaller screens to optimize download times) and optimized CSS/JS (mobile
devices don't need the same JS/CSS as desktop browsers do) are the
obvious ones.

The most optimal way to handle responsive images and optimize CSS/JS
would be on the server-side. However, server-side does not have enough
information about device capabilities, resulting in emergence of all
kinds of cruft-y solutions (e.g. using div's for img tags etc.) that
should not exist.

However, browsers do know a lot about devices they are running on and
could pass that information to servers as part of the initial request,
making it possible for servers to get way smarter than what we have now.

Something as simple as if browsers passed along device's width/height
information as part of the initial request headers would go a very very
long way, making it possible to make a lot of intelligent decisions on
the server-side (eventually allowing "media-queries-like" systems on the
server-side).

Since some proxy servers cut-off or disable custom headers, probably the
safest way to add this is to add width/height information in the
user-agent header.

The text of this plea was submitted to all major browser vendors and WhatWG group. Many thanks to @paul_irish for suggesting the latter.